In the 1950s, two Yiddish-language encyclopedias of Jewish artists who died in the Holocaust were published. Remarkably enough, there was also a third and only slightly different work which almost appeared in the same decade but never made it into print. Alyssa Quint tells its story:

Der Jude und die Kunst Probleme der Gegenwart (“The Jew and the Problem of Art in Contemporary Times”) was written in German and prepared for publication in 1938 by the Austrian art historian Otto Schneid. The manuscript of this encyclopedia boasted a preface by the great German-Jewish theologian Martin Buber.

Schneid tried several times to publish his encyclopedia after the war, but he failed. Drafts of it (in German, Hebrew, and partially in English) are held in the University of Toronto’s Fisher Archive, where Schneid’s collection also includes letters that he received from artists throughout the 1930s and letters from surviving artists who wrote to him in the 1950s.

Schneid was a firsthand witness to the École de Paris, or School of Paris, and its robust Jewish component. . . . The art historian Edouard Roditi explains that many of these artists, especially between 1910 and 1940, were of East European Jewish origin, leading some to refer to this scene as the Jewish school of Paris or school of Montparnasse, for the Left Bank neighborhood where these Jewish artists lived and congregated. These were the artists that Schneid sought to document in real time.

At the moment, Hizballah’s superiors in Tehran probably aren’t giving much thought to the militia’s next move. More likely, they are focused on the fact that their country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, along with the foreign minister, may have been killed in a helicopter crash near the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Iranians set off fireworks to celebrate the possible death of this man known as “butcher of Tehran” for his role in executing dissidents. Shay Khatiri explains what will happen next:

If the president is dead or unable to perform his duties for longer than two months, the first vice-president, the speaker of the parliament, and the chief justice, with the consent of the supreme leader, form a council to choose the succession mechanism. In effect, this means that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will decide [how to proceed]. Either a new election is called, or Khamenei will dictate that the council chooses a single person to avoid an election in time of crisis.

Whatever happens next, however, Raisi’s “hard landing” will mark the first chapter in a game of musical chairs that will consume the Islamic Republic for months and will set the stage not only for the post-Raisi era, but the post-Khamenei one as well.

As for the inevitable speculation that Raisi’s death wasn’t an accident: everything I have read so far suggests that it was. Still, that its foremost enemy will be distracted by a succession struggle is good news for Israel. And it wouldn’t be terrible if Iran’s leaders suspect that the Mossad just might have taken out Raisi. For all their rhetoric about martyrdom, I doubt they relish the prospect of becoming martyrs themselves.